Tweet Tweet, do you Twitter?

As a small business owner or owner of small businesses, to be precise, it’s highly relevant to stay on top of the latest on social media and where your customers are ‘hanging out’. Whether it’s the latest fad (Snapchat, dare I say) or Facebook’s latest acquisition.

What do I think about Twitter?

I love cute Larry, the bird. I love that 1 billion tweets are sent globally every 2 days. I love Twitter staff, the office and their slick presentations. I do believe in their branding impacts with video. I love that they house the world’s data signals with @ and #. I love the fact that they came up with the # (hashtags). I do love that they popularised short-form content.

Though from a SMB strategy perspective, if you ask me for an honest opinion on Twitter – I’ll admit that it is my least of priorities on the myriad of Social Media platforms I use. Not necessarily because it’s ineffective but it has probably lost its relevancy in promoting businesses. I do realise I’m being harsh here but honesty is the best policy when it comes to helping small businesses prioritise their efforts. Would I recommend my clients to pay $12K on promoted trends (a hashtag) for a single day? Yes I would, if they were a large, million dollar business and running a branding campaign. But definitely not for SMB’s who are focussed on measurable impacts on their marketing dollars that they entrust us with.

That said, Twitter is still a place to be present in for all small businesses. It’s free to set up accounts and there are quite some smart strategies that are free to help you understand the latest trending topics that your customers are interested in. In turn, there are some nuggets that you can leverage in there to target your customers. How? Ask the experts?

If you lack the time to post separately on Twitter, the least you can do is to link up the account to your more active Social Media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram so that your updates are automatically pushed onto Twitter. The are also plenty of tools out there which help you manage your multiple platforms in the one place. The one we like is Hootsuite. Is it effective then, to be just pushing automatic updates from Facebook to Twitter? No, it’s not best practise. But as a small business, we understand that you may lack the time to dedicate targeted messaging on each platform. In this instance, better to have presence than none at all. That’s our perspective. Some will argue otherwise. We’ll leave it you to test and analyse!